Hope, Rigging and Relativisations in the Making of Neoliberal Academia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is hardly news that neoliberal academia, to say the least, might not be the very best place for conducting critical research. Among the scholars with a critical bent, this is such a widely accepted fact that it basically constitutes a truism. However, it is one thing to say that contemporary academia is hostile to critical scholarship, but quite another to understand mechanisms pertaining to such a state of affairs. With the aim of illuminating the performativity of neoliberal academia, the article first examines how neoliberalism engages academic subjectivity, making it apparent that it is our hope of establishing a decent academic career at some point in the future that fosters the excessiveness of neoliberal academia. Second, by focusing on the rigging of academic positions, the article reminds us that the performativity of neoliberal academia is not at all foreign to the foreclosure of competitiveness. Third, while emphasising the importance of questioning the (in)existence of critical thinking in contemporary society, I analyse some viewpoints in academia that relativise the rigging of academic positions and the lack of critical scholarship in neoliberal academia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.082 | 0.074 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.180 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.035 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".